Now listening to 12/3/81[Madison Wisconsin]on TIGDH on SiriusXM's Grateful Dead channel via the webstream now playing Beat It On Down The Line.
As I may have mentioned earlier, Joe Smith's book Off the Record from the late 80's is worth finding. It has some of his Grateful Dead anecdotes, and short interviews with Garcia (post-"Touch of Gray," discussing Deadheads) and Hart (discussing his father).
It seems I was at a GD show 27 years ago tonight in Denver. They had IT dialed in that night and tore the roof off Big Mac. Gone are the days...
That's ok by me most of the time though as I couldn't care less about between song tuning noise or stage chatter, etc. As long as all the actual music is there and I can sequence it properly, i'm good
November was almost certainly my lightest month of GD listening in the past two and a half years, although I've gone to sleep to either Grayfolded or this Europe 72 Dark Star mix (Dark Starlets: A Europe ’72 Single-Song Mega-Mix ) most nights, and that's been a load of fun. I also avoided this thread for something like 12 days, and had a lot to catch up on yesterday when I felt the itch returning. (Congratulations to @wavethatflag and @trd on your imminent unclehood! My four-year-old niece and two-year-old nephew are a hoot. I wish I got to see them more often.) I listened to most of the Spirit of '76 Cow Palace bonus disc yesterday, albeit out of order, and then finally got around to playing Ready Or Not. Although I've been saying for ages now that I wish they'd put out more compilations, my first reaction to the announcement of this one was that it wasn't quite what I had in mind. Nevertheless, I purchased it, and I'm very glad I did. I think it's effectively sequenced, and all the performances are engaging enough, even when the songs themselves don't do much for me, which is most of the time. (Big fan of the four Garcia songs; don't particularly care for the Weir songs, although this Corrina is definitely a highlight; would much rather listen to Way to Go Home than Samba in the Rain.) I wish Jerry had sung this So Many Roads better, but oh well. And this Days Between... my god. I cannot imagine a more powerful closing track here. I was worried that hearing all these songs grouped together would be a slog, but all in all, I think it turned out surprisingly good. I might even listen to it again tonight. Too bad about the missing Phil songs, though.
It's kind of sad that he let the Dead go without a fight because they weren't that important to the label, other than them helping establish WB's reputation, he said, and then in the next breath he added that they were one of his two or three most important signings. I suppose he meant that they weren't a Top 10 act like James Taylor, so losing the Dead wasn't going to hurt the bottom line so much, but geeez that's cold. After delivering the folkie/roots material that had made Smith so happy, the Dead had become a Top 30 act on the Albums chart. After going out on their own, the Dead put a few albums in the Top 20. So, Smith was leaving some money on the table, and considering that the band had helped make WB a hip label, by his own admission, I think his attitude is kind of baffling. I guess he really, really did not want to deal with Phil anymore.
So I listened to Ready or Not today...my first live GD disc! (a gasp arises from the crowd!) I recently purchased the upcoming Daves picks for the year. Whats the general consensus of Ready or Not as compared to the Daves picks series? Should I expect the same sort of thing, or are the Picks usually better?
I think you're reading too much into it. The Dead didn't want to work with Warners anymore and it didn't really matter to Smith's bottom line one way or another. Why fight to keep them? To bolster his ego? To retain their hipness? It seems like this was a reasonable, win/win solution. Fighting to keep them would just mean that much more resentment and "I told you so" if the band didn't turn around and become superstars. Presumably most of the bad feelings from 1968 and 69 were gone by then, papered over by the sales of the albums from 1970-72, so going their separate ways seems like the business equivalent of "breaking up while we're still friends".
Umm...yeah. Ready Or Not is latter day Dead and is what their last album would have roughly looked like song-wise. 1968-77 Dead. You can not go wrong.
Well it's hard to generalize, and certainly every year of the Dead's career has gems to recommend it, but yes, Dave's Picks are usually better.
This following excerpt about Joe Smith was in a post in Dead Essays that I just happened to read tonight. Grateful Dead Guide: The Dead In The Studio, 1966 “In August ’66, [Tom] Donahue [of Autumn Records] urged his friend Joe Smith (promotional director at Warner Bros) to see the Dead at the Avalon (on Aug 19 or 20). The story was recounted in the book San Francisco Nights – Smith remembered: “They were playing this weekend at the Avalon and I was supposed to meet them late, after the gig… So there we were, walking up the steps of this startling place, and there were these kids lying around painting each other’s bodies, and all these lights and smells everywhere. Somebody wanted to dance with my wife. I told her, ‘Don’t come with me to meet the band. You must understand.’ The Grateful Dead: even the name was intimidating. What did it mean? No one knew.” Donahue: “Joe told me that night, ‘Tom, I don’t think Jack Warner will ever understand this. I don’t know if I understand it myself, but I really feel like they’re good.’ I told him, ‘You’ve got to sign them, because this is where it’s going.’” Smith: “I was talking to all of them. They always moved in a phalanx, and the ones I really remember were their managers, Rock Scully and Danny Rifkin. Those two were scammers from eight miles back. I could figure them out…the others were out in space somewhere. Garcia was the most visible, but he refused to speak for the group. Pigpen never said ten words, and Lesh was very nasty, constantly negative, because I was a record-company guy and he was a serious musician. We had this conversation about the right kind of equipment to record with, and I later found out that the stuff they wanted hadn’t been invented yet. Lesh felt they were selling out by not getting it… I told them I wanted them, that we were a good record company. That was before I found out that to them, every record company was square. They lived in terror of being ripped off.” Nonetheless, both sides were interested enough to get a contract discussion going, and just a month later, September 30, the contract with Warner Bros was settled. (Though the Dead themselves hesitated to sign it until December!) The recording sessions for their first album down in Los Angeles soon followed.”
Well, that's certainly a unique point of entry. Mark me down for Dave's Picks being better, but we're not exactly comparing like with like here. I'm still gathering my thoughts on Ready Or Not -- the 90s are not a period in which I spend much time, so I haven't heard these songs enough for many of them to be all that familiar, and in fact last night was the first time I ever even heard Easy Answers -- but I think what surprised me is how well these songs work as a group, even while seeming like something of a mish-mash. I have sort of a hard time conceiving of them as part of the Grateful Dead songbook, for some reason, but having them collected and presented in this manner is really helpful.
I suspect you will fully become “one of us” once you start delving into the Dave’s Picks. Even the lesser picks from Dave are usually pretty good on some level.
Ready or Not may be the worst Dead live album ever released. Expect the Dave's Picks to be very different from that, no matter what he picks!
the picks by dick and dave are better because they are prime dead usually iconic shows within the dead trading circles
Dave’s Picks are better, yes, but I quite enjoyed Ready or Not. Good luck finding hard copies of DaP's! Luckily I had a mate at work who's a Deadhead and he had them all on CD so I borrowed and ripped. I've only been a subscriber for the last two years.
The "song" part may be tightest in Estimated's early months, but I think in late '77-78 is when the jams got great. In May '77 it's still pretty brisk (the middle solo's only 20 seconds or so!) but by November '77 Jerry's traveling to hypno-realm in the jams. '78 might be the song's peak year.
